UgCS Drone light shows are the new black

As event organisers look for new ways to amaze their customers, drone shows are becoming more popular than ever.

Hundreds of light pixels in the sky, composing intricate patterns, words or even portraits in a delicate dance.

Drone shows used to be a thing from the future, but in the past few years, they have helped to open a new chapter in the entertainment industry. They have already appeared at the Olympics, the Super Bowl, Coachella festival, Cirque du Soleil performances and many other landmark events, both corporate and private. Why are they gaining popularity so fast, how are they designed and can you have one for yourself — let’s go through the basics of drone shows.

Drones with benefits Just a couple of years ago, no one could have imagined something like this is possible, let alone affordable for almost any event or drone company. Drone shows are not trying to outcompete more traditional ways of lighting up the sky such as fireworks and laser shows – indeed, they often happen together – but drone shows do have significant benefits that set them aside from other aerial show types.

Firstly, they can be used both indoors and outdoors, with endless possibilities to scale them up and down — from a few dozen drones to thousands. They don’t make loud noises, and so avoid causing stress to animals and children.

They can also be used in conditions when using rockets is too dangerous — such as dry areas at risk of wildfires. This is why states like California, Colorado and Arizona decided to switch to drone shows for their July 4th celebrations this year.

Drone shows are also immensely flexible in terms of choreography — drones can dance ballet or display logos, create two and three-dimensional forms, move fast and slow, go high up or stay close to the awestruck spectators. And, since we’ve got onto the subject of choreography, how are drone shows actually created?

Creating a show to remember Finding drones is easy these days. Companies offer the option to rent drones — hundreds of them, if necessary. The types of drones used in shows are typically smaller ones with a bright LED light fitted to them. To make them dance, the choreographer first needs to envision images that will be displayed in the sky and create a compelling story. Then a 3D animator comes into play, having the task of transferring these moves into three-dimensional space.

Then comes the difficult part — programming. It’s pretty obvious that when hundreds of drones are involved, they cannot be flown by pilots — no human can achieve the level of precision needed to perform such complicated harmonised movements. This is a problem that companies like SPH Engineering can solve. Currently, their Drone Show Software is the only widely commercially available software for drone show mission planning, management and control.

Money question While recent drone shows across the world have been visually astonishing, they have also been mind-blowingly expensive. Shows created by large corporations are notorious for costing at least several hundred thousand dollars. But SPH Engineering can promise to deliver the necessary software for just a small fraction of this price. “We have developed proprietary technology that makes it much easier to put on drone shows,” says Janis Kuze, Sales Director at SPH Engineering. “We want to help not only global companies but also regional and local event agencies and organisers to bring the beauty and technological awe of drone shows to their audiences”

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The world’s largest agricultural drone fleet is transforming the way farmers manage their crops. Through a collaboration with Corteva Agriscience™, Agriculture Division of DowDuPont, DroneDeploy’s advanced mapping software is powering Corteva Agriscience’s fleet of more than 400 DJI drones across the company’s global teams, including:

Spanning three continents, DroneDeploy’s Live Map technology provides Corteva Agriscience’s UAV fleet of DJI drones with immediate insights to diagnose and correct agronomic, disease, and pest concerns, as well as to suggest locations for optimal product placement.

Agriculture may be as old as civilization itself, but thanks to new technologies that make it easier to monitor crops and maximize yields, the industry remains on the cutting edge. In less than 15 minutes, advanced UAV technology can survey a 160-acre field to identify variations in plant soil and health, giving farmers direct access to real-time aerial views and data to help make informed agronomic decisions. The result is a full-scale drone operation that gives agronomists and contract seed growers the ability to make timely determinations that directly impact seed yields and quality.

DroneDeploy’s Live Map technology provides real-time crop insights that enable growers to take immediate agronomic actions in the field. Whether it’s identifying an area that lacks irrigation or a particular crop that’s sprouting better (or worse) than expected, agricultural UAVs enable farmers to course correct issues through powerful, data-driven insights. Once drone fleets are ready to be deployed to field teams, drone operators undergo training to determine how to harness the power of aerial technology and ensure that operations adhere to local aviation regulations.

Utilizing UAVs developed by DJI, the collaboration between Corteva Agriscience and DroneDeploy brings some of the world’s most powerful agriscience solutions together with the world’s leading commercial drones and commercial drone software. Corteva Agriscience’s portfolio of products includes some of the world’s most recognizable brands in agriculture, including Pioneer, Brevant seeds, and Encirca and Granular, as well as Crop Protection products developed through active chemistry and technology.

DJI, the world leader in commercial and civilian drones, makes up more than 70% of the drone market and offers a wide variety of UAV products across many different industries. Combined with DroneDeploy’s user-friendly platform for real-time sharable drone maps and 3D models, farmers and agronomists across the globe will be able to carry out data-driven actions to keep fields full, healthy, and ready for seasons to come.

Where to Learn MoreLearn more about the improvements to the DroneDeploy Map Engine.Explore the DroneDeploy App Market to see more than 80 apps you can use today to generate insights with drone data.eBook: Drones in Agriculture

Be sure to read our latest eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Drones on the Farm.

In our previous post, we discuss the many ways you can begin using drones to improve inspections in the oil and gas sector. In this post, we take a look at the impact drones have on operations—and why it’s time you should consider investing in a drone program.

Drones provide O&G companies many benefits, including cost savings, improved communication, a safer work environment, and more accurate data. Read on to explore the key ways drones can transform your workflows.

Inspecting O&G infrastructure and gathering critical data with drones cost substantially less than traditional inspection methods that require ground crews or manned flights. Drones are tough birds and can withstand harsh temperatures and other conditions. They get much closer to infrastructure than a helicopter or airplane, providing better visuals and data. Drones also minimize downtime by avoiding the need to shut down operations for inspections and by catching leaks and other maintenance issues early, lowering remediation costs.

Drones enable employees to conduct inspection and monitoring tasks without exposing themselves to the typical dangers of O&G operations. As a result, work hours lost due to injuries decline, medical expenses and insurance costs shrink, and the number of workplace events reported to OSHA and other regulatory agencies drop.

Safer Work Environments

Manual infrastructure inspections are often dangerous. For example, inspectors at wells and offshore rigs must climb up and down ladders and along catwalks — and even use cranes or harnesses and rappelling equipment to reach equipment. Inspectors sometimes must work in close proximity to harmful chemicals and dangerous machinery.

Drones perform inspections without risking employee safety. They’re particularly useful for inspections after blowouts or natural disasters — or when sending a ground crew to a site may be difficult, costly or unsafe.

Better, More Accurate Data

Drones provide a flexible platform for a wide range of cameras and sensors. They can collect data needed for situations requiring real-time solutions or store data for later analysis. Businesses can easily integrate digitized mapping information and other data from drone flights into analytical and AI solutions for advanced processing. For example, software solutions use topographical and geological data gathered by drones to create models that help identify promising oil and gas drill sites.

Not only do drones gather information more efficiently than human inspectors, the digital data enables employees to make better, data-driven decisions. This drastically reduces downtime, catches conflicts and issues faster, and helps keep your operation running like the well-oiled machine that it is.

Superior Communication

The remote nature of oil and gas work often requires operators to communicate with workers on sites around the world. This can present a challenge to managers and engineers working from the headquarters and collaborating with the boots on the ground. But drones can make things easier. Workers on the ground can fly drones on their site and upload the data to the cloud where back office managers can review and coordinate further inspection or follow ups — all without leaving the desk chair. Using software such as DroneDeploy makes it easy for the back office to markup maps or drop in annotations in real time so that inspectors can check on pressure points, leaks, or other potential issues.

Where to Learn More

The latest drone technology — like aerial mapping, thermal imaging, and digital terrain modeling — gives you a rich set of data to streamline your workflows and generate real-time insights.

A free guide to measuring stockpiles and gathering accurate inventory counts with UAVs.

Whether you work in the construction, mining, or aggregates sectors, stockpile management is a critical requirement on any job site. But measuring stockpiles can be unsafe, time-consuming, and expensive. This puts you in a difficult position. You need accurate data to run your business operations, but you shouldn’t have to send your survey team into the field for hours to clamber across stockpiles on a dangerous job site.

What if you could gather the same survey data in minutes from the safety of the ground, all while achieving higher accuracy and freeing up your survey team to focus on other high-priority projects? Sound too good to be true? Nope. Drones can help.

While you may be familiar with drone photography, drones are also a trusted tool for surveying and measurement. They eliminate many of the challenges companies face with traditional survey solutions. And drones paired with powerful photogrammetry software from DroneDeploy can help lower your data collection costs, increase accuracy, save you time, and keep your team out of harm’s way — all without having to hire an entire survey team or invest in expensive laser or lidar hardware.

“Everyone should be using drones for stockpile analysis. It’s miles ahead of standard surveying.” — Tecia White, President at Whitewater Hydrogeology Ltd.Read the full case study

Over the last 4 years, our team has worked with thousands of customers measuring stockpiles with drones. In that time, we’ve learned the techniques that produce highly-accurate results that our customers expect from DroneDeploy.

In our latest eBook, we take a deep dive into the stockpile measurement workflow using DroneDeploy—covering best practices and answers to the most frequently asked questions from our customers.

The best practices for flying, processing, and analyzing stockpiles with DroneDeployHow to get precise volume measurements and generate instant stockpile reportsHow to achieve high degrees of measurement accuracy and why it mattersThe most common app integrations for stockpile management used by DroneDeploy customersHow three innovative companies have used DroneDeploy’s stockpile measurement tools to cut costs, save time, and improve safety on their job sitesWhere to Learn More

Some of the largest oil and gas companies around the world now deploy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones, to address a wide variety of operational challenges. This rapidly improving technology, along with advances in big data and artificial intelligence, is poised to transform the O&G industry in the coming years.

The aerial intelligence provided by drones offers several key benefits, including safer inspections and helping companies comply with regulatory requirements — while saving them millions of dollars in labor, remediation, and other costs.

Drones are the perfect solution for conducting visual inspections of infrastructure and gathering extensive data. An increasing number of O&G companies use drones to perform three basic industry functions — pipeline inspection and monitoring, oil well and rig inspection, and surveying and construction monitoring — at a significantly lower cost than ground, manned aircraft or helicopter inspection crews.

Read on to learn more about the leading uses of drones in the oil and gas sector.

Pipeline Inspection and Monitoring

By taking photos and videos of above-ground pipelines, drones allow inspectors in the field or engineers in a remote location to view pipes, either in real time or later. The operator can zero in on areas of concern to gather additional information and, if necessary, recommend that a ground crew visually check the area.

By examining the vegetation index, inspectors can identify specific areas of concern with DroneDeploy, catching leaks before they spread. Read the case study.

To detect potential underground leaks, drones take photos along pipeline routes. User-friendly software from DroneDeploy combines these images, creating high-resolution vegetation maps that identify plant kill-off zones, which may indicate a leak. Equipping a drone with an infrared camera provides an additional way to inspect pipelines: Thermal imagery of pipeline routes reveal hotspots, which may indicate potential defects in pipeline insulation or leaks invisible to the human eye.

Drone images also detect anomalies along a pipeline network or any encroachments, such as construction or roadwork, on a right-of-way that could threaten the integrity of the pipeline. In case of significant leaks, explosions or other emergency situations, drones provide real-time video to help emergency response teams assess the situation before sending in crews.

An operator inspects an oil well using drone POV goggles, while remaining safely on the ground. Photo courtesy of Bruin E&P Partners.Oil Well and Rig Inspection

O&G companies also use drones to photograph oil wells and offshore rigs throughout the initial drilling process. Once the well is operating, drones efficiently monitor operations. For example, they provide a close-up look at a flare stack while it’s in service. That provides a real benefit to the traditional approach: shutting down the flare system and assigning an inspector to climb the stack to examine it. In this case, a drone inspection saves weeks of physical inspection preparation and avoids significant loss of productivity and revenue due to an operational shutdown.

This drone-generated 3D model of oil storage tanks replaced helicopter imagery and saved $3500 over a five-month period. Read the full case study.

Drone inspections help companies prevent health and safety events (HSE), allowing them to address operational issues without sending employees into dangerous zones. Drones also provide easy surveillance of remote or hard-to-reach assets, such as storage tanks.

Drones are taking on an expanding role in both the oil exploration and construction stages.2 They survey prospective drilling locations and gather key data without the time and expense of traditional surveying methods. Once a well site is ready for development, drones deployed during the construction stage of wells, rigs, pipelines and refineries conduct crucial as-built surveys, allowing managers to keep track of a project’s progress and provide quality assurance of the build-outs.

Construction compliance officers use drone photos to compare actual conditions to pre-construction designs, as well as to detect and correct plan defects and deviations and spot any potential safety issues. This information also helps streamline decision-making throughout the project. Companies can even create, document and share a visual timeline with all stakeholders. Once construction is finished, drones provide a digital 3-D representation of structures to use as a baseline reference.

This orthomosaic drone map shows construction progress taking place on a well site. Map courtesy of Bruin E&P Partners.

Drones provide extremely precise aerial intelligence that simplifies and improves a wide range of O&G processes. Whether inspecting hundreds of miles of oil pipelines for leaks, helping employees keep operations in compliance with regulations or enabling companies to construct infrastructure more efficiently, agile and flexible UAVs have quickly become a go-to tool for operators around the world.

Product Release Wrap-Up January 2019Kick off the New Year with improved accuracy and AI tools from DroneDeploy

Since launching the Projects interface last month, our team has been busy implementing a series of new features to improve your team’s productivity and overall map accuracy in 2019.

Read on to learn more about new automated flight settings, map alignment capabilities, Autodesk export options, and a suite of AI tools now available to DroneDeploy customers.

The Joy of aligned maps in action over the course of a project.Align Maps Over Time — Instantly.

Comparing maps over time is one of the most common uses of DroneDeploy. But comparing the same areas can be tricky if the maps don’t line up. Unfortunately, GPS accuracy varies and maps of the same location can shift anywhere between 5–10 meters without the use of ground control points (GCPs).

To overcome this problem, we built a new solution into our proprietary Map Engine to align new maps with those previously made at the same location. As an added benefit, the absolute accuracy and scale of a map made with GCPs will improve the accuracy of future maps in the same area — meaning you can map more often with less effort and still get great results.

Use map alignment in conjunction with the “Side-by-Side” app, to see how things have changed on your site.

Automatic Map Alignment is now available to all paying DroneDeploy customers.

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Filter and Sort Map Annotations

Have you ever had trouble finding the annotation or measurement that you’re looking for in a map with dozens or even hundreds of annotations? Or perhaps you’ve wanted to hide specific annotations and focus on those that are most important? New improvements to DroneDeploy annotations make both of these tasks possible.

Now you can view a list of all of the annotations on your map. You can then select or hide specific annotations, and you can even use the search and filter tools to look for specific annotations or annotation types.

Filter annotations by measurement type using the filter icon on the dashboard.Simplify GCP Tagging with Ground Control AI

For those times when absolute accuracy is required, efficient use of GCPs and checkpoints for mapping is extremely important. For the last six months, thanks to thousands of DroneDeploy customers tagging GCPs, we’ve trained our machine learning algorithms to automatically identify and geolocate the most popular types of GCP markers automatically.

Here are a few examples of the types of GCP markers that DroneDeploy can now detect and geolocate to save you time:

If some, or all of your GCPs are automatically identified, you’ll get a notification in the typical email workflow. You will notice that many of your GCPs are already tagged when you open the link.

Ground Control AI will continue to improve as you use it, and will learn from your corrections over time.

Once GCPs have been detected, you can finish selecting any additional GCPs that may be in the map.

Ground Control AI is now available to all Business and Enterprise customers.

Detect and Annotate Objects with Count AI

We launched our Counting tool last August. Since then, customers have annotated more than 360,000 objects. Uses include auditing solar panels, asset quantification, damage assessments, crop yield estimation, and more. With a significant amount of counting data under our belts, our team can now rapidly train our counting algorithms to detect and count custom objects for our enterprise customers.

Select an area and Count AI does the rest.

The first two object types we are supporting are cars and trees, but if your workflow requires counting any object series in your maps, sign up for our beta program today and contact your DroneDeploy Account Manager to learn more about this new feature.

Measuring stockpiles on construction sites, mines, and quarries is one of the most common use of DroneDeploy’s measurement tools. To speed up the stockpile measurement workflow, we developed our Stockpile AI assistant to annotate and measure stockpile volumes with a single click.

When you select the Stockpile AI icon, DroneDeploy will detect and highlight all stockpiles present on your map. You can then generate an instant volume measurement by selecting the stockpile you wish to measure. It’s that easy.

Once the volume annotation is created, it’s still possible to customize the stockpile boundary as you usually would. Keep in mind that like our other machine learning tools, your existing annotations and corrections power Stockpile AI — which will continue to improve the more you use it.

Stockpile AI is now available to all Enterprise customers.

Import Point Clouds from DroneDeploy to AutoDesk

Our construction customers have frequently asked to import drone-generated point clouds from DroneDeploy to AutoDesk Civil 3D, Revit, and Navisworks. We’re happy to announce this capability is now available in DroneDeploy.

To directly import your point cloud files to AutoDesk, choose the AutoDesk (.rcp) format when you export your next point cloud. The .rcp data will also include a .rcs point cloud as well. These new point cloud formats can be exported using all the local and custom coordinate systems we support for existing exports.